Gop Can’t Reach Out To Blacks

With the election of black Republican J.C. Watts to the House of Representatives and the ascendancy of conservative African Americans like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and radio talk show host Armstrong Williams, some would-be prophets predict blacks are now poised to embrace the right.

Their heads are filled with happy visions of the Newt-man chillin’ with the brothers down in the ‘hood. The Republicans have even half-baked a plan, the so-called “GOP Minority Outreach Strategy,” that commits the party to putting black folk front and center at its hearings and media events.

Yes, you might say that the elephant is putting on blackface to attract African Americans to the cause.

Just the idea is nauseating to me. Fortunately, it’s not going to happen. Take that to the bank. Black people are capable of being many things. But not, for the vast majority at least, politically conservative.

Don’t get me wrong. African Americans, like any other thinking people, subscribe to a variety of political philosophies. And there’s no small number who side with the God, Guns and Country crowd on such defining issues as abortion, school prayer and crime. Polls cited in Newsweek last week indicated that up to 40 percent of blacks consider themselves conservative.

But I repeat: Black people can’t BE conservative.

A definition of terms is in order. By “conservative,” I mean something larger than a set of political views. I mean a WORLD view.

Think Patrick Buchanan, strident and mean at the GOP convention in ‘92, or Pat Robertson, smugly self-righteous just about everywhere, and you’ll know the world view I mean: monied and exclusionary. It’s the one that imagines it has God’s beeper number and can summon Him at a moment’s notice.

African Americans can’t adopt the conservative world view because they have too often been its victims. And if the world view holds that government is always an obstacle, WE know that government has frequently been our first agent of change and last line of defense. The conservative world view does not know this, so it does not know us.

It does not know the lost girl searching for herself in the eyes of her newborn, the torn family where drug money is the difference between feasting and fasting, the young scholar struggling for excellence in a school where they take his failure as a given, the 9-year-old would-be Michael Jordan, riddled with bullets at the apex of his dunk.

The conservative movement has spent its entire existence blaming, avoiding, and objectifying those people. Can they be surprised that there is little common ground between us?

Indeed, there is a gulf between blacks and conservatives. It’s nearly impossible to think of a major issue in black American history where the conservative position was vindicated by time. Desegregation? Passage of the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts? The Freedom Rides? Antilynching legislation? Conservatives opposed them all.

Which is why the current attempt at “outreach” is as ungainly as a newborn colt.

Yes, blacks will pick and choose from the rightwing agenda, but they are not yet ready to buy the whole thing.

Consider: In a Gallup poll last year, blacks were asked if they would be better off working within the Democratic Party, the GOP, or forming a third party. Even among those who defined themselves as “conservative,” only 13 percent were willing to cast their lot with the most conservative party.

You may see contradiction in that. I see the savvy recognition of this core truth: We remain the eternal other, the American family’s poor relations. And any fool can tell you that before one can be truly conservative, one must first have something to conserve.

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Leonard Pitts Jr. Knight-Ridder